This year I will use a range of methods to encourage children to think, listen and speak more effectively. This is because our students need to improve their critical thinking and oral language skills.

Friday, 4 May 2018

DFI Workshop 6 - Visibility and Evaluating Sites

Earlier this morning Dorothy presented the idea of making teaching and learning visible.

Why is this important? Here are some key reasons why:

1. Children who have access to their learning via an effective class site are more likely to achieve better results. Children need to know what they are meant to be learning and why.

2. Sharing of teacher inquiry online helps other teachers to improve their overall teaching practice. Therefore the quality of the teaching profession overall is boosted because of the sharing of quality ideas, resources, exemplars and learning.

3. Barriers are removed so that families/whanau can access/view children's learning.

In 2013 famous rapper and musician WILL.I.AM visited our Manaiakalani community of learning because of our visibility and high profile online. He donated $100k to support learning in our Manaiakalani schools.

Goal 1: To make my site more visible. I went incognito online to double check that all my documents etc were visible as some were not.

Goal 2: To make my site more multi-modal: I am planning to include more images and movies etc with less text to make my site more appealing for my audience.

During our 'Deep Dive' session we looked at many different add on programmes that can support our teaching and learning. I think that I will explore 'Sandbox' a little more to see how it can support movie making at our school.

The next thing we looked at was evaluating sites for leading learning. We looked at each others sites and used a google form to evaluate each site. It was quite nerve wracking to be assessed by my peers but surprisingly I received quite a few positive comments. It was interesting to see what others have done with their sites. The main thing is that we need to make it appealing, visible, and easy to access.

2 comments:

Hi Sandy, thanks for this reflective post on what you learned today. I think you wrote some clever summary points of my long winded spiel about visibility and I may quote you next time as you put it so succinctly. I will be interested in what you make of Ok Go Sandbox as I am sure you will bring flair to repurposing some of those ideas.

Thank you for your comments. I always look forward to the DFI workshops because of all the new learning that will help me to make improvements in my job and workflow. Plus it's always good to be reminded of the reasons why we do the things we do and it always comes back to the children. We need to be the best we can for the children that we teach and the only way that we can do that is to continually learn ourselves and upskill. Thanks again to you and Gerhard for the awesome workshops!

SPARK MIT

Sandy Lagitupu

About Me

I work in the Creative Space at Pt England School. My role is to provide digital learning support for classes across the school from Years 1 - 6. I also work with the Year 5/6 and Year 7/8 Extension classes.